The Explorers' Guild: People

The Explorers' Guild is a group of gaming enthusiasts that was founded in 1974 when George Madden acquired a copy of the first published edition of Dungeons and Dragons (now commonly called "Original Dungeons and Dragons") and began to hold gaming sessions with mikel evins, Lane Ramsey, Jon Stewart, Michael McLaughlin, and Bill Babineau. By the beginning of 1975, the group was no longer using the OD&D rules, but was instead creating its own maps and rules.

mikel evins remains the primary contact for the Explorers' Guild, and is the primary creator of most of Explorers' Guild gaming materials. He can be reached by email at this address.

The Explorers' Guild has grown over the years to about two dozen members, most of whom prefer not to be contacted by strangers. If you wish to contact the Guild or its members about game-related topics, you can reach it through mikel.

There are currently 21 active and former members of the group in our projects, or participating in project discussions. A few members of the group have drifted out of contact with us. If you're a current or former member and want your name listed here, contact mikel.

Beginnings

The Explorers' Guild is a gaming group that began in 1974 when three friends began to play games built on the original, three-volume set of Dungeons and Dragons rules from Tactical Systems Rules. That original group quickly gained several additional regular players, and rapidly evolved away from strict adherence to the D&D rules. By the time the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules were published in 1977, we had long since stopped using any rules but our own.

Evolution

Over the following three decades, this group continued to play and to evolve. We gradually added new members, even as most of the original members drifted away. We continued to play pencil-and-paper roleplaying games, using our own increasingly idiosyncratic rules, along with maps, illustrations, mythologies, languages, and histories that we created from scratch ourselves.

We also experimented with, and eventually absorbed, many other games, including Civilization, Cosmic Encounter, Magic: The Gathering, Illuminati, Toon, Nomic, and Diplomacy. In most cases, we modified and adapted the standard rules to suit our eccentric style of play. For example, we replaced the Diplomacy map with maps of our own, created by obtaining large USGS maps of the surfaces of Mars and Venus, and hand-coloring them to make Diplomacy maps. When playing the Civilization boardgame, we discarded the standard map, replacing it with a world of our own invention, and then modifying the rules to permit warfare and the development of civilizations in a world with more than one intelligent species, and in which magic was as potent as technology.

Eventually, we turned to computer games that could sustain our tinkering: Sim Earth and Sim Life were early favorites, as was Sid Meier's Civilization, especially because we could modify the game to introduce new factions and new maps.

Massive

Massively-multiplayer online games did not capture our attention for a long time. We knew about Ultima Online and Everquest, but a cursory investigation suggested that these games were not friendly to the kind of wholesale modification and invention that had always been our style. We wanted an imaginary world to share with others online, but we already had the world; we just wanted the software to make it live. For a short time, Neverwinter Nights looked like a good possibility, but then the details of the license terms emerged and we lost interest. After decades of work and play on our imaginary worlds, we weren't interested in any tools that could potentially interfere with using our worlds however we wanted, including selling access to them, if we chose.

For a while, we played real-time strategy games. Command and Conquer, Cossacks, Age of Empires, Starcraft, and the whole series of Warcraft games were a lot of fun. Eventually we tired of the genre, though. The design of such games doesn't lend itself easily to the kinds of modifications we do, and they don't serve as good vehicles for the easy creation of lots of original content. Still, when we heard that Blizzard was working on an MMORPG based on the Warcraft world, we were excited. Blizzard was very good at creating fun games, and we could always hope that there would be room in their MMORPG for player-created content.

WoW

Of course, we were disappointed. Like most MMORPGs, World of Warcraft is essentially a long and elaborate Disneyland-style ride, with very little room for the players to create anything that can become part of the world. In fact, WoW was even more restrictive than some earlier games. In Ultima Online, for example, it had been possible for a dedicated group of roleplayers, Shadowclan, to create a culture that became so much a part of the game that even the publisher acknowledged it, effectively ceding control of certain in-game locations to Shadowclan. Even this very limited version of player-created content was unavailable in WoW.

WoW was still a very good game, though, and we played it avidly. We discovered a new vehicle for creativity, in the form of roleplaying guilds and teams. The original Shadowclan still exists, and has branches in many games, including WoW. Other roleplaying guilds, similar in spirit, though different in theme and detail, can be found in several MMORPGs. We adapted quickly to this form of collaborative fiction. We joined some existing RP guilds, and created others ourselves.

Vision

The group of people that we now call The Explorers' Guild has evolved quite a bit over the years. We're still in touch with most of the first members, who played with us in the late 1970s, though some have passed away or given up games. We've even played World of Warcraft with some of them. We've also continued to add new members to the group as the years have passed. We had a strong group that came together in the eighties, and played regularly until the end of the decade. The nineties were a less productive time for the group, because of the demands of careers and family, but we nevertheless did some of our most interesting and original game development during that time, and made some important new friendships. One of the new friends we made in the nineties, for example, has gone on to create his own game-development company.

The vision of The Explorers' Guild has remained consistent through three decades, countless games, and a shifting membership. Our basic approach to gaming is to start with a setting and some characters and improvise from there, creating people, places, and stories by making them up as we go along. Our new creations always respect the world that has already been created by past players, and we always strive to extend what already exists with new inventions that complement what is already there, while opening grand new possibilities.

The Explorers' Guild has evolved a unique approach to playing many types of games, and its own rules for Roleplaying games. This unique approach is designed to enable players to create worlds and stories by improvising the adventures of characters.

That is the essential mission of The Explorers' Guild in a nutshell, and has become something of a trademark of the Guild: to create the world by exploring it.

Our Worlds

The world of Ymra is a repository of our past adventures and creations, and the setting for new adventures that we create. When we play a game that prevents us from living in Ymra, we often create characters and relationships that borrow as much as we can from Ymra.

Originally created by mikel evins in 1975, and named Ompapheria, Ymra has evolved and accumulated thousands of pages of history, language, politics, legends, and adventures. In part, these are the works of individual players playing the games. The most prolific controbutor is mikel evins, who has most often been the Guild's Game Master, and who has written the largest share of campaigns and scenarios for the Guild. Many details, though, including characters, locations, buildings, artifacts, heroes, gods and demons, relationships, political intrigues, battles, and other features of the world, are the creations of other players, made in the course of playing the games, and other GMs have controbuted major regions and other features of the world. Notable contributors include Michael McLaughlin, Jon Stewart, Rick Blevins, D. Eric Maikranz, and Keith Nemitz.

Ymra is mainly a collection of boxes full of paper accumulated over the years. Over the past couple of years, mikel has begun to slowly convert these materials to digital form, and to make them available on the web. That process will continue here on the Explorers' Guild website.

In the early 1990s, mikel began work on a science fiction novel, The Dream of the Witch. The setting of that novel, our Solar System five thousand years in the future, has become a second setting for XG games, called Solaria. Solaria is a relam in which humanity has expanded in force to colonize every major body in the Solar System, in which the wildest dreams of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence have come true, and in which a bewildering variety of alien creatures inhabits the plaents and asteroids, no less alien because their ancestors or their makers were human.

The Future

World of Warcraft caused a rapid growth in the size of the MMORPG gaming community, and it provided new avenues of expression for The Explorers' Guild, We have created a number of projects in various games, such as Caer Darrow in WoW and The Frosthammer Clan in Warhammer Online and Lord of the Rings Online. We'll continue to develop and expand these projects.

We also continue to work on the long-term vision of bringing the world of Ymra to life. Several of our members are software developers, some of us working in the games industry. We continue to work on the software tools and the detailed game design that will one day make possible a full realization of an Explorers' Guild game: a massively-multiplayer persistent environment in which players have the tools and the freedom to explore a world into existence.

The Guild

The Explorers' Guild also remains an active gaming community. We continue to create and expand projects, and we continue to recruit new members for our teams. You can find information about our existing projects here on the Explorers' Guild website, and in the Explorers' Guild forums. If The Explorers' Guild sounds like something you want to be involved in, jump over to the forums and create an account. We'll be glad to have you.